Objectives: To compare the quality of end-of-life care in Medicare Advantage (MA) and traditional Medicare (TM), specifically, receipt and length of hospice care.
Design: Retrospective analysis of administrative data.
Setting: Hospice care.
Participants: Veterans dually enrolled in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and MA or TM who died between 2008 and 2013 (N = 1,515,441).
Measurements: Outcomes studied included use and duration of hospice care. Use of a VHA-enrolled population allowed for risk adjustment that is otherwise challenging when studying MA.
Results: Adjusted analyses revealed that MA beneficiaries were more likely to receive hospice than TM beneficiaries; results corroborate published non-risk-adjusted analyses. MA beneficiaries had shorter hospice duration; this is an opposite direction of effect than non-risk-adjusted analyses. Results were robust to multiple sensitivity analyses limiting the cohort to individuals in MA and TM who had equal opportunity for their comorbidities to be captured. Removing risk adjustment resulted in results that mirrored those in the existing published literature.
Conclusion: Our work provides two important insights regarding MA that are important to consider as enrollment in this insurance mechanism grows. First, MA beneficiaries received poorer-quality end-of-life care than TM beneficiaries, as ascertained by exposure to hospice. Second, any comparisons made between MA and TM require proper risk adjustment to obtain correct directions of effect. We encourage the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to make comorbidity data specific to MA enrollees available to researchers for these purposes.
Keywords: Medicare; hospice; risk adjustment.
© 2018, Copyright the Authors Journal compilation © 2018, The American Geriatrics Society.